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Obama admin achieves goal for veteran hiring commitments one year early
First lady Michelle Obama announced on Wednesday that the Obama administration has achieved its stated goal for U.S. businesses to commit to training or hiring 100,000 veterans by the end of 2013 “more than a year ahead of schedule.”
“I thought this challenge was pretty ambitious,” Michelle Obama said at Florida’s Mayport Naval Station in a speech live-streamed by the Department of Defense to every U.S. military base around the world. “When we first started out, we only had two companies as our partners, and I wondered to myself how we were going to get from there to 100,000 new jobs in two years.
"But, fortunately, I didn’t have much time to sit around and worry, because before long, companies across this country started stepping up — big companies like Siemens and Sears; small businesses like tech startups and restaurants and transportation providers,” she continued. “And today, I am so proud to announce that these 2,000 companies have not just met our challenge — they’ve exceeded it. As of today, they have hired or trained 125,000 veterans and military spouses — 125,000. And they’ve done it more than a year ahead of schedule. That’s pretty impressive.”
Michelle Obama and Dr. Jill Biden, the vice president’s wife, have overseen the project as part of their Joining Forces initiative to support the troops. Joining Forces projects include an online Veterans Job Bank where Obama said more than 1 million jobs are posted. She and Biden are also pushing for states to pass legislation to make it
easier for military spouses to transfer their licenses and
certification credentials from state to state as they move, something she mentioned in her speech.
The first lady said the companies involved have pledged “to hire or train another quarter of a million of our nation’s heroes — a quarter of a million, 250,000 — including at least 50,000 military spouses.”
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